Gatekeepers

Gatekeepers are communication professionals who are involved in the traditional news selection process. They sort through a number of messages, shaping chosen messages before delivering them to viewers, readers, or listeners. Gatekeeping involves selecting, shaping, displaying, and withholding messages. In news organizations, reporters, copywriters, photographers, editors, or even media owners function as gatekeepers by choosing and shaping newsworthy messages. In a more social context, public relations professionals, government officials, and other social actors play a role in gatekeeping by deciding on what messages are disseminated to news organizations and by controlling the channel of news information.

The term gatekeeper was originally coined by sociologist Kurt Lewin in his study of the primary role of housewives in the family's changing food habits. Lewin proposed that housewives directed the flow of food items and therefore functioned as “gates” or gatekeepers; later the term was applied to the news selection processes. David Manning White's 1950 study of a small-city daily newspaper editor found that the news selection process depends on the editors’ news values or on what they consider newsworthy. The gatekeeping phenomenon is linked to the channel concept in the conceptual models of communication given by Bruce H. Westley and Malcolm S. MacLean and Wilbur Shramm.

Gatekeeping is a broad function that occurs to affect the flow of information in the channels between senders and receivers of messages. Gatekeepers determine what messages are selected or rejected. Messages travel through certain communication channels and certain points within the channels function as gates, which are managed mostly by gatekeepers. Originally gatekeepers were viewed as individuals, such as journalists working for the traditional media of television, radio, and wire services.

However, decisions on what messages will make the news information are also influenced by a number of other factors. Pamela J. Shoemaker (1991) suggested the complexity of gatekeeping by a number of gatekeepers at various levels: by communication routines and by organizational, [Page 385]social, and institutional (extra-media) systems. Thus journalists are influenced by their news values or practices, budgetary or time restrictions, competition with other media, advertisers, social ideology, and other factors that also function as gatekeepers in the gatekeeping process.

The gatekeeper concept has recently changed. Journalists traditionally functioned as gatekeepers, but they now use information subsidies provided by public relations professionals for reducing the costs of information gathering. Such subsidies occur because public relations practitioners supply newsworthy information to reporters. This professional service reduces the costs of news organizations. They can use the information provided by practitioners in various forms, such as press releases, backgrounders, and fact sheets. They have interviews handed to them. Many news reports are little more than edited releases supplied by public relations professionals. And with the advent of the Web, information can be available to reporters in a commodified form 24/7.

The advance of online media has also changed the gatekeeper role of journalists. More organizations, companies, and authorities directly reach their publics through online media without journalists’ gatekeeping. Public information officials, governmental or corporate spokespersons, and other public relations professionals have increasingly assumed the gatekeeper role by judging what information can be shared with key publics or how communication with those publics can be managed as practitioners serve as boundary spanners. As organizations become primary sources of information, journalists are sometimes less influential in the gatekeeping process because people can obtain information from the organization without the help of journalists.

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